About Steven Wilson
Steven John Wilson is an English musician. He is the founder, guitarist, lead vocalist and songwriter of the rock band Porcupine Tree, as well as being a member of several other bands, including Blackfield, Storm Corrosion and No-Man. He is also a solo artist, having released seven solo albums since his solo debut Insurgentes in 2008. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Wilson has made music prolifically and earned critical acclaim. His honours include six nominations for Grammy Awards: twice with Porcupine Tree, once with his collaborative band Storm Corrosion and three times as a solo artist. In 2017, The Daily Telegraph described him as "a resolutely independent artist" and "probably the most successful British artist you've never heard of".
Wilson is a self-taught composer, producer, audio engineer, guitar and keyboard player, and plays other instruments as needed, including bass guitar, autoharp, hammered dulcimer and flute. His influences and work have encompassed a diverse range of genres including pop, psychedelia, progressive rock and electronic, among others, shifting his musical direction through his albums. His concerts incorporate quadraphonic sound and elaborate visuals. He has worked with artists such as Elton John, Guns N' Roses, XTC, Opeth, Pendulum, Yes, King Crimson, Fish, Marillion, Black Sabbath, and Anathema, and has built a reputation for his work remixing classic pop and rock records into new stereo, 5.1 and Dolby Atmos versions.
Wilson is currently working on his forthcoming eighth studio album, The Overview, scheduled for release in early 2025.
Born in Kingston upon Thames, London, Wilson was raised from age six in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, where he discovered his interest in music around the age of eight. According to Wilson, his life was changed one Christmas when his parents bought presents for each other in the form of LPs. His father and mother received Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby, respectively. It was Wilson's affinity for these albums that helped craft his guitar and songwriting abilities. He said, "In retrospect I can see how they are almost entirely responsible for the direction that my music has taken ever since." His interest in Pink Floyd led him towards experimental/psychedelic conceptual progressive rock , and Donna Summer's trance-inflected grooves inspired the initial musical approach of No-Man .
As a child, Wilson was forced to learn the guitar, but he did not enjoy it; his parents eventually stopped paying for lessons. When he was eleven, he found a nylon string classical guitar from his attic and started to experiment with it; in his own words, "scraping microphones across the strings, feeding the resulting sound into overloaded reel to reel tape recorders and producing a primitive form of multi-track recording by bouncing between two cassette machines". A year later, his father, who was an electronic engineer, built him his first multi-track tape machine and a vocoder so he could begin experimenting with the possibilities of studio recording.
Wilson said his taste in music diverged from his peers in the 1980s:
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